Yes. Also 54 seemed kinda high so I looked into it and it looks like CAFE still uses outdated MPG ratings which are different from what goes on the current EPA sticker rating. Turns out the way they are rating MPG for CAFE standards is about 20% over current consumer EPA ratings.
So while CAFE will be 54mpg, for the rating system consumers see will probably be closer to 54 * 0.80 = 43mpg.
In my opinion, the current EPA rating is still a little optimistic so real world drivers will probably only see 35-40mpg with current driving habits.
I call anecdotal bullshit. I've seen plenty of friends with iphones that have cracked screens, dying screens, or buttons that don't work. I also have a friend that is a loyal Apple customer (stood in line just to buy his iphone 4) go through two iphone 4 phones for overheating issues.
This article is just more worthless speculation. Bluetooth and NFC serve totally different purposes. The primary purpose of Bluetooth is tethering of devices wirelessly. The primary purpose of NFC is a "wireless key".
Probably some of the best implementations of NFC are already available. One example is hotel room card keys. Instead of a physical key, you get a card. The card conveniently unlocks your hotel room door.
Another good use for NFC is public transit ticket readers. Instead of purchasing a ticket, you just recharge a card. The card works just like the hotel key card except you tap it on subway ticket gates. The gate connects to a database and updates your card balance.
In both of these instances security requirements are low because (connection) speed is more important. For example say you lose your hotel key card. The back up security in this instance is to deactivate the existing key card and assign a new one. This is actually much more convenient than hiring someone to walk up to the physical lock and replace it with a new one.
Bluetooth is totally different. You DON'T want your phone to be syncing with every potential bluetooth device within 10 meters. You only want bluetooth to sync with trusted devices.
But of course this article will generate lots of comment traffic and lots of misleading comments that automatically get modded up just because it's about Apple.
What typically happens in impoverished nations is people have too many babies. The extra babies creates more demand for food until there's not enough food to feed everyone. Since there isn't enough food, someone starves.
So if you just let people starve, this cycle will happen over and over again because you're just letting the resources dictate population. Since the birthrate goes uncontrolled, the population will grow till the food supply can't support more people. But since everyone needs to eat, most of the resources go back into food so the top demand item is always food and most of the population just works to grow food.
If you want to solve this problem, the solution is in controlling the birthrate. When you control the birthrate, you can actually reduce or stabilize demand for food. Since there are fewer people to feed, the extra resources can now be poured into luxuries OTHER than food.
Actually the populace can reduce the effectiveness of a trademark by genericizing it. If everyone from your grandmother to your 5 year old nephew began using "app" and "app store" as everyday jargon, the trademark would be genericized and has reduced legal protection.
So if you want to annoy Jobs and co, all you have to do is start referring to any software as an "app" and any outlet that sells software as an "app store" regardless of if it is or is not owned or run by Apple.
Some examples of companies that suffered from this effect are the term "googling" instead of "searching" and use of "kleenex" instead of "tissue".
It isn't just maximize. It is also because certain apps and even websites are designed to take up your entire screen, and the DPI or pixel density on current displays is abysmal.
If documentation on a webpage is taking up my entire screen in order to be usable, I have to keep switching back and forth in order to get work done. If the IDE is designed to take up my entire screen, now anytime there is testing I have to switch back and forth to understand what's going on.
Pixel density comes in because it limits the size of the fonts we can use. Anything lower than 8pt or 6pt becomes too pixelated to be readable. Yet my smart phone has a dpi about 230dpi and I can read much smaller fonts with ease. Meanwhile my current 17" monitor at work only has 90dpi!
If you want to easily increase productivity, give everyone 2 monitors. Not just the devs and engineers, but also the accountants. Being able to read two full size documents of anything whether it be a spreadsheet or a page of code WILL increase productivity.
The excuse against multiple monitors is ridiculous. In the past a single 17" CRT used to cost $300 in 1990s dollars. These days a 19" LCD monitor can be found for $110.
I think the real problem is that people mostly can't afford to live close to where they work.
They wouldn't be able to live so far away from work if gas taxes or road taxes reflected their true costs on the user. Right now, gas taxes alone do not cover the maintenance of roads.
Relatively cheap transportation sorta creates this situation, but there has got to be better ways to solve this than by making transportation more expensive with all of this metering equipment.
I'm all for the gas tax but eventually this will become useless as new EV vehicles come up. Then you have the same problem. I also would like to see a more fair way of distributing the taxes. A lot of cyclists would argue that the big rigs and cars damage the roads far more than their 20 pound bicycle.
As for the metering device, I don't think it is necessary either. The same thing can be accomplished by checking the odometer on a regular basis. This can be done through annual vehicle registration.
This is a Japanese article mostly about Japanese culture. The camera is obviously targeted at the Japanese population since they mention Bic Camera which is a popular camera store in Japan.
Over there women/girls love to take pictures. Picture booths called "purikura" (japanese translation/shortening of "Print Club") are in almost every arcade and sometimes even have their own stores. These are your basic photobooths but also add some effects. For example, skin tone always appears clear/white even if you're on the darker side of the skin tone spectrum or if you have skin blemishes. These effects are obviously tuned to what Japanese girls consider beautiful.
If you were to offer a camera that offered purikura-like capabilities, it would sell like krispy kreme donuts in Japan. They're very into the way things appear on the outside.
Despite that I don't know why they don't place more emphasis on straight/white teeth and plastic surgery modifications. Korea is more into permanent modifications like plastic surgery but Japan seems to only be interested in looks or appearances.
The best OS claim is subjective, but the beauty is you can run your choice of OS on an Apple - it's no irony that one of the best Windows laptops is the Macbook Pro.
That's a lie and that's not how it works. You can run any OS of your choice on a PC, even Apple's Mac OSX. The difference is Apple will not allow you to run their OS on any hardware. There's nothing stopping me from taking a random Windows box and loading up Linux, FreeBSD, or anything else for that matter. In fact there's nothing stopping me from running OSX on my PC either, except Apple's OSX license terms.
I find Android slow, clunky, and Java-based SDK's (like Eclipse and the Blackberry dev environment) to be the same - where XCode is smoothe and elegant - even if I did have to go buy a Mac in order to develop for it!
I'm not sure this is a valid complaint. I didn't find Xcode "smoothe and elegant". Maybe I didn't find enough time to get used to it but it was hardly a wonderful experience.
Eclipse isn't bad at all. It does occasionally crash or chew up memory, other than that it is fine on modern hardware. Some of the features are actually worlds better than other IDEs like the autocomplete and automatic library detection. It actually does get rid of a lot of the Java tedium.
ADT (Android Dev Toolkit) isn't bad either. My only gripe here is that DDMS should be a little more usable and stuff like the emulator SD card should be easier to access/manage.
Most of the complaints from real android devs will likely stem from one of two things: the SDK design or the Android Market. I consider a good chunk of the android SDK either "brain dead" in design or inconsistent.
By "brain dead" I mean many parts of the android SDK seem slapped together and designed to be easy for the android OS devs to implement. Take for example Activity menus. In order to set those things up you have to override at least one method onCreateMenu or something something. In there you'll likely have to define a switch statement to handle a menu id. The menu ids are enumerated by you rather than someone else. All of this just adds drudgery code that shouldn't be your responsibility.
By inconsistent it seems like each dev totally didn't communicate with anyone else on what they were designing. From notifications to menus, to dialogs, to activity design, all of it uses different paradigms. In some instances you feel like you're writing C code, in others you feel like maybe you're writing something that's Java OOP but not quite.
The final complaints stem from the market itself for which Google is doing a very lousy job. It wasn't till recently that more than 2 screen shots were allowed and the description field was increased from some ridiculous character count (maybe 500 characters or so).
The market still sucks for a number of reasons. For example, the only interface available is still the default one on the android device. Where's the advertised "web" browser enabled market?
The android market interface (on devices) itself sucks because it lacks a useful browsing feature. The recommended way to find an app is through "searching" but people don't "search" a store when they want to buy something that they don't know exists. They browse and see what's available through a process called "shopping". There is no good way to "browse" the android market because the categories are too general and there's no way to limit items by parameter/rating/cost/feature. At times I wish Google would let go of its hard-on for search because search isn't the right interface for every use case.
I could go on with the faults, but that's enough for now.
Ok Esperanto guy, here's your pop quiz. Please translate the following English expressions:
There's no "I" in "TEAM".
Fuck!
I have diarrhea.
Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.
Voila!
She's a 10.
Mr Smith.
In one study,[42] a group of European secondary school students studied Esperanto for one year, then French for three years, and ended up with a significantly better command of French than a control group, who studied French for all four years.
But why is that? Why does the correlation hold true? I've studied more than 2 languages and by anecdote, I would say learning the 3rd is easier than learning the 2nd. Partly because I had taken a linguistics course and the third language was taught in a different manner than the 2nd language.
When you learn a language, you shouldn't just throw up an expression and say "this is a direct translation of this". Instead the phrase should be decomposed into it's grammar particles and the structure of the phrase should be understood. From this you can now hand that blueprint to any student and tell them they can do something like "NOUN1 particle NOUN2 *copula*" is a translation of the English "NOUN1 *copula* article NOUN2". Now the student will correctly translate between phrases or ideas instead of words. The problem of learning a new language then simplifies into understanding correct grammar rules and exceptions, the limitations on those rules, and the required vocabulary to correctly express enough ideas.
Beyond that, the artistic, cultural, and idiomatic portions of any language will get you every time in translation. These things cannot always be translated because the target language may be missing the appropriate expressions. Worse, certain cultures prevent the use of some grammatically legal expressions. For example I could go outside and ask an attractive woman that I have never met before, "How old are you?" I would then probably receive a slap on my face. But take that same expression, translated, to many east Asian cultures like Japan or Korea, and you'll find that it is culturally acceptable for that question to be asked and sometimes necessary.
The projectors have a built-in end-of-life device. It's the bulb. The projector companies will likely stop producing the bulbs or make replacement bulbs more expensive than buying a new projector.
The grandparent post may have talked about anger and frustration but I've gone through enough by now (I'm still in my 20's) to realize life isn't all happiness and glory. There's an awful lot of sorrow and pain in life. Even though that exists, most people can overcome it the first few times. But it is the repetitive nature of the up and downs in life that beats a person into submission. Some may tolerate more than others but everyone has their limit eventually.
I have no doubt there are elderly people in their 80s or older that still enjoy life. But there are a good number of people past 40 and even 30 that are already tired of the burden partially because of the cards they were dealt at birth. Some of these people are still fighting with all their heart and the slightest hope for improvement in quality of life, but I've met enough to know there are some people that die trying or get their years cut short. It isn't a fair game for everyone, so blanket statements like "you die when you stop enjoying life" are certainly naive. If that were true, some people were born dead I guess.
I am sitting here perfectly happy with my unlocked from the factory NexusOne. I've been running froyo for months now. I don't have any of the "I need root" nonsense the other phones have.
The phone networks got to you and Google gave up.
Maybe they did, maybe they didn't since there's lots of rumors of a Nexus Two.
They certainly didn't market or sell the phone correctly. Even Steve Jobs doesn't throw up a web page and expect people to buy his products. What does he do? He throws the press a bone or two before his official announcement to get everyone all excited and curious. He has a grand planned out event where he tells the world "behold, the next best thing EVAR!" And on the same day or near future, many different brick and mortar stores have the product ready for sale, for touching and looking. And if you missed all that, there's giant ads on walls, billboards, TV, and other mediums.
Google, a company that primarily makes money off of a marketing/advertising product certainly dropped the ball when it came to product awareness marketing. For a product, the NexusOne is a great product. But in terms of awareness, nobody knows about it. Pretty much everyone I talk to I have to give the run-down on the history and what it can do. It is just as capable as any of the Samsung Galaxy phones.
I also know that marketing speak is disliked around here but Google really should have advertised a primary feature being "Android Care" or something similar. All "Android Care" would mean is free and timely updates such as Froyo, etc. The updates really are a step up from the competition including Apple. The releases of Android are much more often than other devices.
Google needs to learn to commit to things and sell them rather than leaving things out there and hoping people will bite. Yes, that means hiring those pesky "marketing" guys, hiring an ad agency, and coming up with a valid Marketing Strategy, not just build a product and throw up a webpage.
The division isn't because older android versions aren't compatible in newer versions, the division is because developers want to use features of newer SDKs that are not available in the older ones. There are many big and important changes from 1.5 to 1.6 and 1.6 to 2.0. But many devs started around 1.5 or 1.6 and so they already have a user base or they started with 2.0, had success, and wanted to capture more market by making compatible 1.5 or 1.6 versions.
So while you can use the 1.5 version, it probably lacks features and has other restrictions that are not present in the 2.X version. All newer devs are switching to 2.X since the 1.5 and 1.6 market share is stagnating/shrinking and many features in the SDK aren't there. Nearly all new devices are 2.X android so it doesn't make much business sense to deal with the limitations in the 1.5 or 1.6 SDKs.
Not quite. IIRC diesel engines use the heat/compression to ignite while gasoline direct injection engines still require a spark plug. Wikipedia also states that GDI engines can reach compression ratios as high as 65:1 in certain conditions.
At 1" I still think of it as a giant brick. It fits in the bag, but the bag has to be large enough and it feels bulky in the bag just like a text book. At around half an inch, it begins to feel more like a thin pad of paper and since there's a lot less material, the overall weight is lighter.
Fold it in half, and I could fit it into a large coat pocket.
Portability isn't just about fitting into pockets. It has more to do with weight. A netbook still doesn't fit in your coat pocket yet it still sold like pancakes. People on the go don't mind the bag, they do mind how bulky the bag has to be and how heavy the bag is. Go to most dense metropolitan areas where foot traffic is the primary method of traveling and you will notice that everyone has a bag. Go to any university campus and you'll notice the same thing.
Thinness plays a bigger role in the bag than you think. Suppose I have a backpack full of stuff and all of those things are really thick. That means the center of gravity for the bag is further away from my back. With the bag on, my center of gravity gets shifted further out and I must compensate more for it. The net result is either I lean forward or use more muscle activity to deal with the awkward center of gravity. As things in the bag get thinner, the center of gravity shifts closer to my back and there is less effort required to compensate.
The whole idea behind portability is not to get rid of the bag, it is to make the bag more manageable. When you think portability, think of the college student with a backpack, the business man with a briefcase, or a metropolitan women with a bag. Even if you eliminate the laptop/netbook, all three of these types people are still going to carry around a bag.
For reference, an Intel Core i3 330UM @ 1.20GHz scores 1196 and an Intel Core2 Duo U9600 @ 1.60GHz scores 1129.
CPU speeds on these new Macbook Airs seem to be... rather pathetic
That's like asking for a big rig with a trailer to pull 1G on a skidpad or a Tesla Roadster to tow a big rig trailer.
Is the Air underpowered? Of course. But you find me an 11" form factor laptop that doesn't look like a giant brick and has a 2ghz+ i7. Not even the Dell Alienware M11x offers more than a 1.06ghz i7 or 1.3ghz Core 2.
I don't normally defend Apple but you're really comparing two different product lines. They still have a replacement for your 12" powerbook, it is called a MacBook Pro (13"). Ok, it is one inch more, but it is still small and has all the bells and whistles you're droning on about.
The Air series seems to target portability users where weight and size requirements trump all others. A MacBook Pro 13" comes in at 4.5lbs, while the MacBook Air 13" comes in at 2.9lbs, and the 11" version at 2.3lbs.
You simply can't argue much when the thing has nearly half the volume and weight of the fully loaded version. If the weight simply doesn't matter get the Pro. But for some people like myself, every pound counts when you're on the go. So I'll gladly shed things like dvd drives, ethernet ports, firewire, and even a GHz of CPU if it means 2 pounds less in weight. Obviously I have limitations: the atom cpu is much too slow for my needs and most integrated graphics solutions still don't cut it these days. The Air still comes with a good GPU and a good CPU. So there isn't much to complain about.
I don't think they're playing catchup. They've already described some of the upcoming features like C2MD (cloud to mobile device) and there are a lot of things in iOS land that don't exist in Android land. For example bluetooth file transfers are enabled in 2.x androids while iOS doesn't have it. Similarly Android still has a lot of design that hasn't been copied by iOS (yet) like fully replaceable components such as keyboards and clients (SMS, email, etc). Multitasking still makes more sense in Android from a dev viewpoint and the notification bar actually is useful as it prevents a lot of unnecessary popups that steal attention or focus.
There's only a few areas that I think are actually important/useful in iOS that Android is still lacking: hardware graphics acceleration (by default), screenshots, a certain missing UI widgets (for developers).
That doesn't mean there are things I wish android had. One of them is bluetooth HID in the stock firmware for connecting keyboards and other input devices. But will iOS ever support this? If Jobs had his way, it wouldn't ever support that because that would mean random company or business making crap hardware for his products without paying royalties or being blessed by Apple first.
Here's some other things that android has that iOS still doesn't have:
Apple designs to be productive, which makes it annoying for people who already have burned in productivity habits from platforms where this is less of a design ethic.
So one button mice were productive? Or annoying dock magnification? Or how about the fact that iphone didn't have copy and paste for a long time? Don't bring up the "they were implementing it the right way" bs when everyone claimed "it's easier to use that way!" to justify the lack of copy and paste or the lack of multiple mouse buttons.
Apple doesn't do that much better of a job with productivity when there are many concepts of productivity they simply refuse to accept. They don't seem to accept productive things if they didn't come up with it first or Steve Jobs just happens to not like it. If macs were really productive, they'd ship with mice that had a second button and a wheel, and windows would be resizable from all edges (even edges with zero pixel borders) not just the bottom right corner.
If you want a more recent example just look at how annoying popups are on iphone. You could be sitting there trying to type away and then a stupid window pops up saying "open wifi networks blah blah blah" but you think you're typing and accidentally hit the "connect" button when you don't mean to. Meanwhile on android that would never happen because the notification pull down never steals your focus.
I don't get it. I have a nexus one. I have flash installed and I have it set to load when I ask it to. So here's what happens:
Go to webpage with flash
See a flash box
Tap the flash box if I want to see the flash rendered
Here's what happens on the ipod touch:
Go to webpage with flash
See the "you can't see this, no matter what you do, because Jobs-says-so icon"
Leave website.
So how does this suck?
If you're talking about the user experience, yes, many flash pages were not designed for a touch device because you can't completely emulate the mouse pointer with touch. But many javascript pages don't work well either when they assume a mouse pointer as well.
I'd like to see amazon and other online shops tape the product to the inside wall of a box. Literally just take that stupid plastic product container and a piece of shipping tap and stick it to the inside flap of a box. On the outside of the box say "don't cut here" on the side it is taped to and on the opposite side (safe side) say "open here".
Ok, it won't work for stuff in boxes or other adhesive unfriendly packaging. But for plastic shrink wrap crap that takes a beating to open, just tape it to the box.
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Yes. Also 54 seemed kinda high so I looked into it and it looks like CAFE still uses outdated MPG ratings which are different from what goes on the current EPA sticker rating. Turns out the way they are rating MPG for CAFE standards is about 20% over current consumer EPA ratings.
So while CAFE will be 54mpg, for the rating system consumers see will probably be closer to 54 * 0.80 = 43mpg.
In my opinion, the current EPA rating is still a little optimistic so real world drivers will probably only see 35-40mpg with current driving habits.
I call anecdotal bullshit. I've seen plenty of friends with iphones that have cracked screens, dying screens, or buttons that don't work. I also have a friend that is a loyal Apple customer (stood in line just to buy his iphone 4) go through two iphone 4 phones for overheating issues.
This article is just more worthless speculation. Bluetooth and NFC serve totally different purposes. The primary purpose of Bluetooth is tethering of devices wirelessly. The primary purpose of NFC is a "wireless key".
Probably some of the best implementations of NFC are already available. One example is hotel room card keys. Instead of a physical key, you get a card. The card conveniently unlocks your hotel room door.
Another good use for NFC is public transit ticket readers. Instead of purchasing a ticket, you just recharge a card. The card works just like the hotel key card except you tap it on subway ticket gates. The gate connects to a database and updates your card balance.
In both of these instances security requirements are low because (connection) speed is more important. For example say you lose your hotel key card. The back up security in this instance is to deactivate the existing key card and assign a new one. This is actually much more convenient than hiring someone to walk up to the physical lock and replace it with a new one.
Bluetooth is totally different. You DON'T want your phone to be syncing with every potential bluetooth device within 10 meters. You only want bluetooth to sync with trusted devices.
But of course this article will generate lots of comment traffic and lots of misleading comments that automatically get modded up just because it's about Apple.
You're solving the wrong problem.
What typically happens in impoverished nations is people have too many babies. The extra babies creates more demand for food until there's not enough food to feed everyone. Since there isn't enough food, someone starves.
So if you just let people starve, this cycle will happen over and over again because you're just letting the resources dictate population. Since the birthrate goes uncontrolled, the population will grow till the food supply can't support more people. But since everyone needs to eat, most of the resources go back into food so the top demand item is always food and most of the population just works to grow food.
If you want to solve this problem, the solution is in controlling the birthrate. When you control the birthrate, you can actually reduce or stabilize demand for food. Since there are fewer people to feed, the extra resources can now be poured into luxuries OTHER than food.
Actually the populace can reduce the effectiveness of a trademark by genericizing it. If everyone from your grandmother to your 5 year old nephew began using "app" and "app store" as everyday jargon, the trademark would be genericized and has reduced legal protection.
So if you want to annoy Jobs and co, all you have to do is start referring to any software as an "app" and any outlet that sells software as an "app store" regardless of if it is or is not owned or run by Apple.
Some examples of companies that suffered from this effect are the term "googling" instead of "searching" and use of "kleenex" instead of "tissue".
It isn't just maximize. It is also because certain apps and even websites are designed to take up your entire screen, and the DPI or pixel density on current displays is abysmal.
If documentation on a webpage is taking up my entire screen in order to be usable, I have to keep switching back and forth in order to get work done. If the IDE is designed to take up my entire screen, now anytime there is testing I have to switch back and forth to understand what's going on.
Pixel density comes in because it limits the size of the fonts we can use. Anything lower than 8pt or 6pt becomes too pixelated to be readable. Yet my smart phone has a dpi about 230dpi and I can read much smaller fonts with ease. Meanwhile my current 17" monitor at work only has 90dpi!
If you want to easily increase productivity, give everyone 2 monitors. Not just the devs and engineers, but also the accountants. Being able to read two full size documents of anything whether it be a spreadsheet or a page of code WILL increase productivity.
The excuse against multiple monitors is ridiculous. In the past a single 17" CRT used to cost $300 in 1990s dollars. These days a 19" LCD monitor can be found for $110.
I think the real problem is that people mostly can't afford to live close to where they work.
They wouldn't be able to live so far away from work if gas taxes or road taxes reflected their true costs on the user. Right now, gas taxes alone do not cover the maintenance of roads.
Relatively cheap transportation sorta creates this situation, but there has got to be better ways to solve this than by making transportation more expensive with all of this metering equipment.
I'm all for the gas tax but eventually this will become useless as new EV vehicles come up. Then you have the same problem. I also would like to see a more fair way of distributing the taxes. A lot of cyclists would argue that the big rigs and cars damage the roads far more than their 20 pound bicycle.
As for the metering device, I don't think it is necessary either. The same thing can be accomplished by checking the odometer on a regular basis. This can be done through annual vehicle registration.
This is a Japanese article mostly about Japanese culture. The camera is obviously targeted at the Japanese population since they mention Bic Camera which is a popular camera store in Japan.
Over there women/girls love to take pictures. Picture booths called "purikura" (japanese translation/shortening of "Print Club") are in almost every arcade and sometimes even have their own stores. These are your basic photobooths but also add some effects. For example, skin tone always appears clear/white even if you're on the darker side of the skin tone spectrum or if you have skin blemishes. These effects are obviously tuned to what Japanese girls consider beautiful.
If you were to offer a camera that offered purikura-like capabilities, it would sell like krispy kreme donuts in Japan. They're very into the way things appear on the outside.
Despite that I don't know why they don't place more emphasis on straight/white teeth and plastic surgery modifications. Korea is more into permanent modifications like plastic surgery but Japan seems to only be interested in looks or appearances.
The best OS claim is subjective, but the beauty is you can run your choice of OS on an Apple - it's no irony that one of the best Windows laptops is the Macbook Pro.
That's a lie and that's not how it works. You can run any OS of your choice on a PC, even Apple's Mac OSX. The difference is Apple will not allow you to run their OS on any hardware. There's nothing stopping me from taking a random Windows box and loading up Linux, FreeBSD, or anything else for that matter. In fact there's nothing stopping me from running OSX on my PC either, except Apple's OSX license terms.
I find Android slow, clunky, and Java-based SDK's (like Eclipse and the Blackberry dev environment) to be the same - where XCode is smoothe and elegant - even if I did have to go buy a Mac in order to develop for it!
I'm not sure this is a valid complaint. I didn't find Xcode "smoothe and elegant". Maybe I didn't find enough time to get used to it but it was hardly a wonderful experience.
Eclipse isn't bad at all. It does occasionally crash or chew up memory, other than that it is fine on modern hardware. Some of the features are actually worlds better than other IDEs like the autocomplete and automatic library detection. It actually does get rid of a lot of the Java tedium.
ADT (Android Dev Toolkit) isn't bad either. My only gripe here is that DDMS should be a little more usable and stuff like the emulator SD card should be easier to access/manage.
Most of the complaints from real android devs will likely stem from one of two things: the SDK design or the Android Market. I consider a good chunk of the android SDK either "brain dead" in design or inconsistent.
By "brain dead" I mean many parts of the android SDK seem slapped together and designed to be easy for the android OS devs to implement. Take for example Activity menus. In order to set those things up you have to override at least one method onCreateMenu or something something. In there you'll likely have to define a switch statement to handle a menu id. The menu ids are enumerated by you rather than someone else. All of this just adds drudgery code that shouldn't be your responsibility.
By inconsistent it seems like each dev totally didn't communicate with anyone else on what they were designing. From notifications to menus, to dialogs, to activity design, all of it uses different paradigms. In some instances you feel like you're writing C code, in others you feel like maybe you're writing something that's Java OOP but not quite.
The final complaints stem from the market itself for which Google is doing a very lousy job. It wasn't till recently that more than 2 screen shots were allowed and the description field was increased from some ridiculous character count (maybe 500 characters or so).
The market still sucks for a number of reasons. For example, the only interface available is still the default one on the android device. Where's the advertised "web" browser enabled market?
The android market interface (on devices) itself sucks because it lacks a useful browsing feature. The recommended way to find an app is through "searching" but people don't "search" a store when they want to buy something that they don't know exists. They browse and see what's available through a process called "shopping". There is no good way to "browse" the android market because the categories are too general and there's no way to limit items by parameter/rating/cost/feature. At times I wish Google would let go of its hard-on for search because search isn't the right interface for every use case.
I could go on with the faults, but that's enough for now.
F R A G M E N T A T I O N
In one study,[42] a group of European secondary school students studied Esperanto for one year, then French for three years, and ended up with a significantly better command of French than a control group, who studied French for all four years.
But why is that? Why does the correlation hold true? I've studied more than 2 languages and by anecdote, I would say learning the 3rd is easier than learning the 2nd. Partly because I had taken a linguistics course and the third language was taught in a different manner than the 2nd language.
When you learn a language, you shouldn't just throw up an expression and say "this is a direct translation of this". Instead the phrase should be decomposed into it's grammar particles and the structure of the phrase should be understood. From this you can now hand that blueprint to any student and tell them they can do something like "NOUN1 particle NOUN2 *copula*" is a translation of the English "NOUN1 *copula* article NOUN2". Now the student will correctly translate between phrases or ideas instead of words. The problem of learning a new language then simplifies into understanding correct grammar rules and exceptions, the limitations on those rules, and the required vocabulary to correctly express enough ideas.
Beyond that, the artistic, cultural, and idiomatic portions of any language will get you every time in translation. These things cannot always be translated because the target language may be missing the appropriate expressions. Worse, certain cultures prevent the use of some grammatically legal expressions. For example I could go outside and ask an attractive woman that I have never met before, "How old are you?" I would then probably receive a slap on my face. But take that same expression, translated, to many east Asian cultures like Japan or Korea, and you'll find that it is culturally acceptable for that question to be asked and sometimes necessary.
Camera on the back, maybe front too, or not at all?
iPod touch has no camera. iPhone2 has 1 camera. iPhone3/3GS has 1 camera. iPhone4 has two cameras. So why are you tagging this on Android?
The projectors have a built-in end-of-life device. It's the bulb. The projector companies will likely stop producing the bulbs or make replacement bulbs more expensive than buying a new projector.
You die when you stop enjoying life.
The grandparent post may have talked about anger and frustration but I've gone through enough by now (I'm still in my 20's) to realize life isn't all happiness and glory. There's an awful lot of sorrow and pain in life. Even though that exists, most people can overcome it the first few times. But it is the repetitive nature of the up and downs in life that beats a person into submission. Some may tolerate more than others but everyone has their limit eventually.
I have no doubt there are elderly people in their 80s or older that still enjoy life. But there are a good number of people past 40 and even 30 that are already tired of the burden partially because of the cards they were dealt at birth. Some of these people are still fighting with all their heart and the slightest hope for improvement in quality of life, but I've met enough to know there are some people that die trying or get their years cut short. It isn't a fair game for everyone, so blanket statements like "you die when you stop enjoying life" are certainly naive. If that were true, some people were born dead I guess.
I am sitting here perfectly happy with my unlocked from the factory NexusOne. I've been running froyo for months now. I don't have any of the "I need root" nonsense the other phones have.
The phone networks got to you and Google gave up.
Maybe they did, maybe they didn't since there's lots of rumors of a Nexus Two.
They certainly didn't market or sell the phone correctly. Even Steve Jobs doesn't throw up a web page and expect people to buy his products. What does he do? He throws the press a bone or two before his official announcement to get everyone all excited and curious. He has a grand planned out event where he tells the world "behold, the next best thing EVAR!" And on the same day or near future, many different brick and mortar stores have the product ready for sale, for touching and looking. And if you missed all that, there's giant ads on walls, billboards, TV, and other mediums.
Google, a company that primarily makes money off of a marketing/advertising product certainly dropped the ball when it came to product awareness marketing. For a product, the NexusOne is a great product. But in terms of awareness, nobody knows about it. Pretty much everyone I talk to I have to give the run-down on the history and what it can do. It is just as capable as any of the Samsung Galaxy phones.
I also know that marketing speak is disliked around here but Google really should have advertised a primary feature being "Android Care" or something similar. All "Android Care" would mean is free and timely updates such as Froyo, etc. The updates really are a step up from the competition including Apple. The releases of Android are much more often than other devices.
Google needs to learn to commit to things and sell them rather than leaving things out there and hoping people will bite. Yes, that means hiring those pesky "marketing" guys, hiring an ad agency, and coming up with a valid Marketing Strategy, not just build a product and throw up a webpage.
The division isn't because older android versions aren't compatible in newer versions, the division is because developers want to use features of newer SDKs that are not available in the older ones. There are many big and important changes from 1.5 to 1.6 and 1.6 to 2.0. But many devs started around 1.5 or 1.6 and so they already have a user base or they started with 2.0, had success, and wanted to capture more market by making compatible 1.5 or 1.6 versions.
So while you can use the 1.5 version, it probably lacks features and has other restrictions that are not present in the 2.X version. All newer devs are switching to 2.X since the 1.5 and 1.6 market share is stagnating/shrinking and many features in the SDK aren't there. Nearly all new devices are 2.X android so it doesn't make much business sense to deal with the limitations in the 1.5 or 1.6 SDKs.
Not quite. IIRC diesel engines use the heat/compression to ignite while gasoline direct injection engines still require a spark plug. Wikipedia also states that GDI engines can reach compression ratios as high as 65:1 in certain conditions.
At 1" I still think of it as a giant brick. It fits in the bag, but the bag has to be large enough and it feels bulky in the bag just like a text book. At around half an inch, it begins to feel more like a thin pad of paper and since there's a lot less material, the overall weight is lighter.
Fold it in half, and I could fit it into a large coat pocket.
Portability isn't just about fitting into pockets. It has more to do with weight. A netbook still doesn't fit in your coat pocket yet it still sold like pancakes. People on the go don't mind the bag, they do mind how bulky the bag has to be and how heavy the bag is. Go to most dense metropolitan areas where foot traffic is the primary method of traveling and you will notice that everyone has a bag. Go to any university campus and you'll notice the same thing.
Thinness plays a bigger role in the bag than you think. Suppose I have a backpack full of stuff and all of those things are really thick. That means the center of gravity for the bag is further away from my back. With the bag on, my center of gravity gets shifted further out and I must compensate more for it. The net result is either I lean forward or use more muscle activity to deal with the awkward center of gravity. As things in the bag get thinner, the center of gravity shifts closer to my back and there is less effort required to compensate.
The whole idea behind portability is not to get rid of the bag, it is to make the bag more manageable. When you think portability, think of the college student with a backpack, the business man with a briefcase, or a metropolitan women with a bag. Even if you eliminate the laptop/netbook, all three of these types people are still going to carry around a bag.
With CPU speeds like these, it almost seems like they just didn't want to say the word 'Atom'.
The fastest available Intel Atom is the D525 which is dual core. It gets 709 on PassMark.
An Intel Core 2 Duo U9400 1.4Ghz, on the same benchmark, gets 963.
For reference, an Intel Core i3 330UM @ 1.20GHz scores 1196 and an Intel Core2 Duo U9600 @ 1.60GHz scores 1129.
CPU speeds on these new Macbook Airs seem to be... rather pathetic
That's like asking for a big rig with a trailer to pull 1G on a skidpad or a Tesla Roadster to tow a big rig trailer.
Is the Air underpowered? Of course. But you find me an 11" form factor laptop that doesn't look like a giant brick and has a 2ghz+ i7. Not even the Dell Alienware M11x offers more than a 1.06ghz i7 or 1.3ghz Core 2.
I don't normally defend Apple but you're really comparing two different product lines. They still have a replacement for your 12" powerbook, it is called a MacBook Pro (13"). Ok, it is one inch more, but it is still small and has all the bells and whistles you're droning on about.
The Air series seems to target portability users where weight and size requirements trump all others. A MacBook Pro 13" comes in at 4.5lbs, while the MacBook Air 13" comes in at 2.9lbs, and the 11" version at 2.3lbs.
You simply can't argue much when the thing has nearly half the volume and weight of the fully loaded version. If the weight simply doesn't matter get the Pro. But for some people like myself, every pound counts when you're on the go. So I'll gladly shed things like dvd drives, ethernet ports, firewire, and even a GHz of CPU if it means 2 pounds less in weight. Obviously I have limitations: the atom cpu is much too slow for my needs and most integrated graphics solutions still don't cut it these days. The Air still comes with a good GPU and a good CPU. So there isn't much to complain about.
I don't think they're playing catchup. They've already described some of the upcoming features like C2MD (cloud to mobile device) and there are a lot of things in iOS land that don't exist in Android land. For example bluetooth file transfers are enabled in 2.x androids while iOS doesn't have it. Similarly Android still has a lot of design that hasn't been copied by iOS (yet) like fully replaceable components such as keyboards and clients (SMS, email, etc). Multitasking still makes more sense in Android from a dev viewpoint and the notification bar actually is useful as it prevents a lot of unnecessary popups that steal attention or focus.
There's only a few areas that I think are actually important/useful in iOS that Android is still lacking: hardware graphics acceleration (by default), screenshots, a certain missing UI widgets (for developers).
That doesn't mean there are things I wish android had. One of them is bluetooth HID in the stock firmware for connecting keyboards and other input devices. But will iOS ever support this? If Jobs had his way, it wouldn't ever support that because that would mean random company or business making crap hardware for his products without paying royalties or being blessed by Apple first.
Here's some other things that android has that iOS still doesn't have:
Apple designs to be productive, which makes it annoying for people who already have burned in productivity habits from platforms where this is less of a design ethic.
So one button mice were productive? Or annoying dock magnification? Or how about the fact that iphone didn't have copy and paste for a long time? Don't bring up the "they were implementing it the right way" bs when everyone claimed "it's easier to use that way!" to justify the lack of copy and paste or the lack of multiple mouse buttons.
Apple doesn't do that much better of a job with productivity when there are many concepts of productivity they simply refuse to accept. They don't seem to accept productive things if they didn't come up with it first or Steve Jobs just happens to not like it. If macs were really productive, they'd ship with mice that had a second button and a wheel, and windows would be resizable from all edges (even edges with zero pixel borders) not just the bottom right corner.
If you want a more recent example just look at how annoying popups are on iphone. You could be sitting there trying to type away and then a stupid window pops up saying "open wifi networks blah blah blah" but you think you're typing and accidentally hit the "connect" button when you don't mean to. Meanwhile on android that would never happen because the notification pull down never steals your focus.
Bottom line: Flash sucks on Android big time.
I don't get it. I have a nexus one. I have flash installed and I have it set to load when I ask it to. So here's what happens:
Here's what happens on the ipod touch:
So how does this suck?
If you're talking about the user experience, yes, many flash pages were not designed for a touch device because you can't completely emulate the mouse pointer with touch. But many javascript pages don't work well either when they assume a mouse pointer as well.
I'd like to see amazon and other online shops tape the product to the inside wall of a box. Literally just take that stupid plastic product container and a piece of shipping tap and stick it to the inside flap of a box. On the outside of the box say "don't cut here" on the side it is taped to and on the opposite side (safe side) say "open here".
Ok, it won't work for stuff in boxes or other adhesive unfriendly packaging. But for plastic shrink wrap crap that takes a beating to open, just tape it to the box.